Watercolor Demo: Using Rigger Brushes

Welcome to Cheap Joe's Test Studio!

The little Rigger brush is one of the most fun brushes, and one of the least expensive brushes you can buy, and it's just so much fun. I'm going to show you some tricks that may help you with the Rigger. I love using it and I think you will, too.

Earlier, I did a segment on stretching watercolor paper and in my absent-mindedness, I forgot to show you how I attach the paper to the gator board. I go all the way around it and just take the staple gun and staple every 6 inches all the way around.

Now I would like to show you the Rigger. This is a Cheap Joe's Happy Strokes Rigger size 2, which is just about a perfect size for all-around use, although I like a 1 occasionally, or a 4 or 5. This Rigger has a little black tip on it right here, and that little tip is telling you something. What it's telling you is "that's where you should hold me" because if you hold it here it will keep you loose. If you hold it down here, you'll be uptight and you dont' want to be uptight with a rigger.

I've activated some dark color just so it would show up really good, and I'm just going to come in here with some trees, as you can see I'm kind of jerking it along because that motion seems to make for nicer limbs and things.

We've got this fence we scraped and we'll add a little bit of darker stuff on the back side of each of those so it gives me some light in there. The rigger is just perfect for adding some of this little detail.

I'm going to pick up some lighter color here and paint in this Evergreen here. Just very loose and very quick, and it gives us a really nice little effect of it being back in the woods there.

It's a fun brush and I get carried away with it sometimes because it is so much fun. That's how I use The Rigger. We can come down here where we scraped in the foreground and put in some of this quicker stuff. The quicker I do it the more natural it looks. Now would be a good time to take our Gem Finder Mats, and see what our painting looks like with all of our details.

We can take the little Rigger right now and put in a few little clapboards on the house for detail to enhance it just a little bit. There we have the beginnings of a painting, certainly, and a lot of fun doing it. That's what's important--we have fun doing it!